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Credo July 2014 Kidd Slider

America’s Spiritual Founding Father (Thomas S. Kidd)

In the new issue of Credo Magazine, “George Whitefield at 300,” Thomas S. Kidd has contributed an article titled, “America’s Spiritual Founding Father.” Kidd (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) is Professor of History at Baylor University. He is the author of several books, including his forthcoming work, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father.

Here is the introduction to Kidd’s article:

On October 12, 1740, in the fading light of a cool autumn evening, twenty-five-year-old evangelist George Whitefield ascended a platform on Boston Common. Before him stood twenty thousand people. If the crowd estimates were reasonably accurate, this was the largest assembly ever gathered in the history of England’s American colonies. (Boston’s entire population was only seventeen thousand in 1740.) Whitefield had already seen crowds this massive—even larger—in the great city of London, but the teeming New England throngs, gathered in the region’s small fishing villages and provincial towns, amazed him.

Sometimes the pressing people frightened him. There were volcanic outbursts of emotion. He regularly had to cut his preaching short, unable to be heard over the cacophonies of weeping and screeching. At the Common, Whitefield implored people to put their faith in Jesus Christ, the kind of sincere faith their Puritan forefathers embraced. It did not matter if their parents were Christians. It did not matter if they prayed or attended church or read their Bibles. Whitefield wanted to know if they had experienced the “new birth” of conversion.

Concluding the sermon, his countenance falling, he told them that it was time for him to go; other audiences needed his gospel preaching, too. “Numbers, great numbers, melted into tears, when I talked of leaving them,” Whitefield wrote. He had begun to forge a special bond with the American colonists. “Boston people are dear to my soul,” he confessed.

New Fixed Credo July 2014 CoverWhitefield, the Evangelical

Reports about this boy wonder began to appear in the colonies’ newspapers in 1739. By 1740 he had become the most famous man in America. (Remember, in 1740 George Washington was eight years old, John Adams was four, Thomas Jefferson was not even born. Ben Franklin’s fame as a printer, which did not extend much beyond Philadelphia, was enhanced considerably by becoming Whitefield’s publisher.) Whitefield was probably the most famous man in Britain, too, or at least the most famous aside from King George II.

Three hundred years after his birth, George Whitefield is not entirely forgotten, but his fame now is far dimmer than it was on that fall evening in Boston. Today Whitefield’s renown is surpassed by other evangelical contemporaries, especially Jonathan Edwards, the great pastor-theologian of Northampton, Massachusetts. Still, Christian treatments of Whitefield abound, highlighted by Arnold Dallimore’s monumental two-volume biography written in the 1970s. Most U.S. History survey courses and textbooks also mention Whitefield, thanks to two major academic biographies, Harry Stout’s The Divine Dramatist (1991), and Frank Lambert’s “Pedlar in Divinity” (1994). These biographies, as well as a surge of recent studies of the Great Awakening, have established Whitefield as a fixture in the standard narrative of American history.

Stout, Lambert, and other scholars have helped us interpret Whitefield within the framework of eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Lambert examined Whitefield in light of the “consumer revolution” of the eighteenth century. As the “Pedlar in Divinity,” Whitefield mastered the use of publicity, newspapers and inexpensive print to promote his preaching tours and the gospel he expounded. Stout, on a related theme, presented Whitefield as “Anglo-America’s first religious celebrity, the symbol for a dawning modern age.”

In his two recent books on Whitefield, communications scholar Jerome Mahaffey has expanded earlier proposals by Stout and historian Alan Heimert by considering how Whitefield became the “Accidental Revolutionary,” or the man most responsible for shaping an American culture primed for the Revolution. Whitefield was the “central figure” in the process by which disparate colonists became Americans, prone to think in zealous, adversarial terms about religion, rights, and liberties. Whitefield’s Awakening may not have caused the Revolution, Mahaffey argued, but it had a profound conditioning influence on Americans as the Revolution approached. Heimert memorably argued that whether Jefferson, “the enlightened sage of Monticello knew it or not, he had inherited the mantle of George Whitefield.”

Whitefield and commerce, Whitefield and religious celebrity, Whitefield and the Revolution—all of these arguments have considerable merit, but they do not really focus on Whitefield’s primary significance, or the way he viewed himself. My argument regarding Whitefield is straightforward: George Whitefield was the key figure in the first generation of Anglo-American evangelical Christianity. Whitefield and legions of other evangelical pastors and laypeople helped establish a new interdenominational religious movement in the eighteenth century, one committed to the gospel of conversion, the new birth, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the preaching of revival across Europe and America. . . .

Read the rest of Kidd’s article today!


To view the Magazine as a PDF [download format=”2″ id=”16″]

We live in a day when those in the church want to have their ears tickled. We do not want a sermon, but a “talk.” “Don’t get preachy, preacher!” is the mantra of many church goers today. What is preferred is a casual, comfortable, and laid back chat with a cup of coffee and a couple of Bible verses to throw into the mix to make sure things get spiritual. One wonders whether Timothy would have been fired as a pastor today for heeding Paul’s advice: “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim. 4:2). Paul gives such a command to Timothy because he knew what was to come. “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (2 Tim. 4:3-4). Has that day come? Are churches filled with “itching ears,” demanding “teachers to suit their own passions”? Have we turned “away from listening to the truth”?

In a day when ears itch and truth is shown the back door, what could be more needed than men who actually preach the Word? George Whitefield (1714-1770) was one of those men. He was a preacher who preached in plain language, so that even the most common man could understand God’s Word. Yet, his sermons were incredibly powerful, often leading men and women to tears as the Holy Spirit convicted their souls. Whitefield not only preached the truth, but he pleaded with his listeners to submit themselves body and soul to the truth. He preached God’s Word with passion because he understood that his listener stood between Heaven and Hell. His robust Calvinism, in other words, led to a zealous evangelism.

This year, 2014, marks the 300th anniversary of Whitefield’s birth. These articles are meant to drive us back to Whitefield’s day, that we might eat up his theology, and drink deeply his passion for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Contributors include: Thomas Kidd, Lee Gatiss, Michael A.G. Haykin, Thomas Nettles, Ian Hugh Clary, Mike McKinley, Mark Noll, Doug Sweeney, and many others.

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